Thursday (August 6), nearly a week after promising to do so, President Donald Trump signed executive orders that would ban the popular social media platform TikTok in the United States in 45 days if they are not sold by their Chinese-owned parent companies (namely ByteDance).
If he thought American execs at TikTok would let go of the multi-billion dollar business without a fight, he’s sadly mistaken. According to reports, they’re ready to wage an all-out legal war to combat Trump’s order.
Details inside:
“The video-sharing app hugely popular with the smartphone generation will file the federal lawsuit as soon as Tuesday (August 11), according to a person who was directly involved in the forthcoming suit but was not authorized to speak for the company. It will be filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, where TikTok’s American operations are based, the person said.
NPR has learned that the lawsuit will argue that President Trump’s far-reaching action is unconstitutional because it failed to give the company a chance to respond. It also alleges that the administration’s national security justification for the order is baseless, according to the source.”
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TikTok has over 100 million global users and more than 1,000 U.S.-based employees that could have their paychecks indefinitely impacted as a result of Trump’s order. What’s worse, it could make it impossible for American lawyers to represent TikTok in any U.S. legal proceedings.
The argument against the president’s decision is that it reportedly was so rushed it did allow the company to participate in any investigation or obtain legal representation to respond to the White House’s claims of breaching cyber-security.